As a historian of the United States and of migration, Reed Ueda has been primarily interested in the intersection of social history and institutional history. He has explored this nexus in studies such as Avenues to Adulthood, Postwar Immigrant America, The New Americans (with Mary C. Waters and Helen Marrow), and in his work as research editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (awarded the Waldo Leland Prize of the American Historical Association). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard. A member of the history department faculty at Tufts since 1981, he co-chairs a consortium in which Tufts is a participating institution, the Inter-University Committee on International Migration at the MIT Center for International Studies. In addition, he is a research associate at the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard. He has written for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the New Republic. He is  currently at work on a book about immigration and citizenship and a U.S. history textbook.