He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1961.
In 2004–2005 he served as the honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento, California. He was given that honor "in recognition of Ueda’s many decades of academic writing about haiku and related genres and his leading translations of Japanese haiku." The library added that "Ueda has been our most consistently useful source for information on Japanese haiku, as well as our finest source for the poems in translation, from Bashô to the present day."[4] His work on female poets and 20th century poets "had an enormous impact".[5]
Bibliography
He is an author of numerous books about Japanese literature and in particular Haiku, Senryū, Tanka, and Japanese poetics.[5]