The University of Geneva traces its origins to 1559, when the reformer John Calvin founded the Académie de Genève as a theological and humanist seminary intended to train Protestant pastors, with Theodore Beza as its first rector. Legal studies were added within a few years, and over the following two centuries the Académie broadened into mathematics and experimental science as Enlightenment scholarship took hold in the city. The years of French annexation between 1798 and 1813 brought a reorganisation into faculties with formal degrees. The institution shed the last of its confessional character and took the title of university during the 1870s, a change accompanied by the creation of a faculty of medicine.

The university is today organised into nine faculties, spanning science, medicine, humanities, law, theology, economics and management, social sciences, psychology and educational science, and translation and interpreting. These are complemented by more than a dozen interfaculty centres and institutes that work across departmental boundaries, among them the Global Studies Institute and centres devoted to environmental and affective sciences. Teaching is delivered principally in French, with English also in use, and is spread across several sites in the eastern part of the city and in neighbouring Carouge. Enrolment stands at roughly 18,000 students, close to 40 per cent of whom come from outside Switzerland.

Research at Geneva is shaped by what surrounds it. Physicists and astronomers collaborate with CERN on the city's outskirts, and with the European Southern Observatory, the European Space Agency and NASA; work associated with the university includes pioneering detections of extrasolar planets and early demonstrations of quantum teleportation. Proximity to the United Nations and to bodies such as the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization has similarly shaped teaching and research in global health, international relations and development studies. The university is a member of the League of European Research Universities, the 4EU+ Alliance and the Coimbra Group, and counts Nobel laureates and Fields medallists among its former students and staff.