Western Sydney University, formerly the University of Western Sydney, is an Australian multi-campus public research university in the Greater Western region of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

The university in its current form was founded in 1989 as a federated network university with an amalgamation between the Nepean College of Advanced Education and the Hawkesbury Agricultural College. The Macarthur Institute of Higher Education was incorporated in the university in 1989. In 2001, the University of Western Sydney was restructured as a single multi-campus university rather than as a federation. In 2015, the university underwent a rebranding which resulted in a change in name from the University of Western Sydney to Western Sydney University. It is a provider of undergraduate, postgraduate, and higher research degrees with campuses in Bankstown, Blacktown, Campbelltown, Hawkesbury, Liverpool, Parramatta, Penrith, and Surabaya.

The university consists of an amalgamation of campuses, each with their own unique and individual history. In 1891, the Hawkesbury campus was established as an agricultural college by the NSW Agricultural Society. At Parramatta, Western Sydney University owns and has renovated the Female Orphan School building, the foundation stone of which was laid by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1813.

In 1987, the New South Wales Labor government planned to name the university Chifley University, after the former Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. However, in 1989, a new Liberal government reversed this decision and controversially named it the University of Western Sydney.

In 1989, teachers' colleges and Colleges of Advanced Education in Sydney's western suburbs were given university status under the University of Western Sydney Act 1988. The 1990s saw the federation of three education providers: UWS Nepean, UWS Hawkesbury, and UWS Macarthur. The university has a legislative basis in NSW state legislation with the passing of the University of Western Sydney Act 1997, which also empowers the university to make by-laws affecting the operation of the university.^{[citation needed]}

A performing arts school had been established at UWS's predecessor, the Nepean College of Advanced Education, in 1980. There was a School of Visual and Performing Arts in the 1990s at UWS Nepean at Kingswood. The early incarnation of the school comprised three specialisations, acting, dance, and theatremaking. The drama school at UWS became known as Theatre Nepean. In 1997, a student-led organisation, CentreStage, was created by second-year performance students as a fund-raising body to cover the costs of staging and promoting Theatre Nepean's graduation productions not only at the Playhouse at the Kingswood campus and the Centre for Contemporary Performance at the Werrington South campus. Ruth Cracknell was its founding patron (and patron of Theatre Nepean until her death in 2002), with John Bell patron, and 1987 graduate of Theatre Nepean, David Wenham, its ambassador in 2002. At some point, due to lack of funding, the school amalgamated its three-discipline program into a single course.

Federal government funding of Australia's universities as a percentage of Australia's GDP was in decline during the years of the Howard government. Federal funding policy was very influential at UWS. In 2000, after internal restructuring and cost-cutting, UWS Hawkesbury, UWS Macarthur, and UWS Nepean ceased to exist as autonomous components of the now defunct University of Western Sydney federation and became the new multi-campus University of Western Sydney.

In the 2000s, UWS consolidated its schools of fine art, social science, humanities, and psychology. In this decade the university introduced its first nanotechnology and biotechnology undergraduate degrees.^{[citation needed]}