Tom Tweed has graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford. He taught at the University of Miami for five years and then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and adjunct professor of American Studies at UNC, where he also has served as founding director of the First Year Seminar Program and—for five years—Associate Dean for Undergraduate Curricula. In that capacity he oversaw the revision of the university’s general education curriculum.

In the Department of Religious Studies, Tweed has taught courses about religion in the United States and method and theory in Religious Studies, and he has received recognition for this teaching, including a "Favorite Faculty" award from the Class of 1997. The same year, UNC awarded him the Philip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and a few years later he was given the Zachary Smith Distinguished Term Professorship (2001-2006).

Tweed’s historical, ethnographic, and theoretical research, which includes five books and a six-volume series of historical documents, has been recognized by election into the American Society for the Study of Religion and supported by several grants and fellowships, including three from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He edited Retelling U.S. Religious History (1997) and co-edited Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (1999), which Choice named an "outstanding academic book." He also wrote The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (1992; 2000) and Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (1997), which won the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence. Tweed's latest book, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion, was published by Harvard University Press in 2006.