The University of Sussex is a public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. Taking its name from the historic county of Sussex, the university received its Royal Charter in August 1961.

The university is currently ranked 11th in the UK, 31st in Europe and 99th in the world by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.The Guardian university guide 2013 placed Sussex joint 27th, and the Times Good University Guide 2012 ranks Sussex at 14th place. Sussex is also a founder member of the 1994 Group of research-intensive universities.

In an effort to establish a university to serve Brighton, a public meeting was held in December 1911 at the Royal Pavilion in order to discover ways to fund the construction of a university; the project was halted by World War I, and the money raised was used instead for books for the Municipal Technical College.^{[citation needed]}

The idea was revived in the 1950s and, in June 1958, the government approved the corporation's scheme for a university at Brighton, the first of a new generation of what came to be known as plate glass universities. The University was established as a company in 1959, with a Royal Charter being granted on 16 August 1961. The University's organisation broke new ground in seeing the campus divided into Schools of Study, with students able to benefit from a multidisciplinary teaching environment. Sussex would emphasise cross-disciplinary activity, so that students would emerge from the university with a range of background or 'contextual' knowledge to complement their specialist 'core' skills in a particular subject area.^{[citation needed]}