Nanchang University was established in 1940 in the name of its original predecessor ─ Zhongzheng University. In the following years, the name was changed several times and its present name Nanchang University was adopted in 1993 when the top two universities of Jiangxi Province Jiangxi University and Jiangxi Industrial University merged to make up the backbone of Nanchang University.

NCU entered a new era of development when it merged with Jiangxi Medical College in August 2005 making it a comprehensive university, offering undergraduate and graduate courses encompassing virtually all academic disciplines.

NCU has a graduate school and 21 schools including Liberal Arts, Foreign Language Studies, Art and Design, Law, Economics and Management, the Sciences, Life Science, Material Science and Engineering, Environmental Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Architectural Engineering, Computer Engineering, Education, Medicine, and Software. These schools offer 82 undergraduate majors out of 11 academic disciplines including the liberal art, history, philosophy, economics, management, law, science, engineering, agriculture, education,fundamental medicine, public health，pharmacy,nursing and 4 clinical schools.These undergraduate programs have a total enrollment of 36,000 full time students.

Although all of the schools offer their own graduate programs, these programs belong to a single graduate school administratively. The NCU Graduate School offers a total of 21 Ph.D. programs and 175 master degree programs with a graduate student body of about 6800. In addition, NCU has two post-doctoral programs.

NCU places great emphasis on international exchange and cooperation. It has established steady exchange programs with more than 30 universities and institutions from over 20 countries worldwide. The Confucius Institute in France, for instance, is a cooperative venture between Nanchang University and University of Kuwaiti of France. It was the first Confucius Institute in Europe. Nanchang University has a long working relationship with Abertay Dundee University of the U.K. in jointly educating master degree students. Every year, a group of Nanchang University graduates will go to Abertay Dundee for their master degrees in computer science. There are similar programs with universities from Germany, the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and other countries and regions.