Atsuko Ueda, Professor of East Asian Studies, specializes in modern Japanese literature and culture. Her research interests include literary historiography of modern Japan; linguistic reforms of Meiji Japan and the production of a "national" language; postwar literary criticism and its relationship to war responsibility. Most recently, she published a book entitled Language, Nation, Race: Linguistic Reform in Meiji Japan 1868-1912 (UC press, 2021), which explores the many proposals for linguistic reforms prevalent in the Meiji period. In this book, she examines the first two decades of the Meiji period with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.

She has recently co-edited The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (New Studies in Modern Japan) and Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism (New Studies in Modern Japan).  She is also the co-editor of Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings of Natsume Sōseki (Columbia University Press, 2009). Her first book, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment, was published by Stanford University Press in 2007.