Kazi Nazrul University (KNU) was established as a teaching and affiliating university in 2012. The University introduced its teaching programmes by commencing post-graduation classes in four core disciplines – Bengali, English, History, and Mathematics. Beginning with four postgraduate programmes, the University has now expanded to accommodate more than 40 programmes in 23 departments, 9 research centres, and more than 20 affiliated colleges. Named after the rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) of India – who is also the national poet of Bangladesh – this University aims at achieving an ideal of creative freedom that marks the life of the mind and the intellectual traffic of ideas. The revolutionary poet Kazi Nazrul has been immortalized in Bengali cultural memory because of his acute thirst for a spirit of independence and his attentiveness to the syncretism that characterizes knowledge traditions as well as transactions. This University has been established with the explicit aim of achieving this same syncretism of purpose and its allied commitment to the dream of a transformed future. The founding vision of KNU is to function effectively as an institutional space encouraging and providing instruction, teaching, training, and research in various branches of learning and courses of study – with a view to promoting the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and extending higher education to meet the immediate needs of society. While teaching activities are the mainstay of any higher educational institution, KNU has been modelled after the Humboldtian fashion of a research university – with specific emphasis on the need for knowledge production alongside processes of dissemination. There have been notable endeavours within the university to set up centres for advanced interdisciplinary exchange and intensive research collaboration, apart from rigorous daily routines of classroom instruction.