University of Sheffield

The University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. The University of Sheffield was originally formed by the merger of three colleges. The Sheffield School of Medicine was founded in 1828, followed in 1879 by the opening of Firth College by Mark Firth, a steel manufacturer, to teach arts and science subjects. Firth College then helped to fund the opening of the Sheffield Technical School in 1884 to teach applied science, the only major faculty the existing colleges did not cover.

The three institutions merged in 1897 to form the University College of Sheffield. It was originally envisaged that the University College would join Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as the fourth member of the federal Victoria University. However, the Victoria University began to split-up before this could happen and so the University College of Sheffield received its own Royal Charter in 1905 and became the University of Sheffield.From 200 full-time students in 1905, the University grew slowly until the 1950s and 1960s when it began to expand rapidly.

Many new buildings (including the famous Arts Tower) were built and student numbers increased to their present levels of over 20,000.In 1995, the University took over the Sheffield and North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery, which greatly increased the size of the medical faculty although in 2005 it decided to pass these subjects over to Sheffield Hallam University.Over the years, the University has been home to a number of famous writers and scholars, including the literary critic William Empson, who was head of the Department of English; author Angela Carter; the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto; and Bernard Crick, who taught politics with future Labour Party politician David Blunkett as one of his students.