The University of Ottawa was first established as the College of Bytown in 1848 by the first bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Ottawa, Joseph-Bruno Guigues. Placed under the direction of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, it was renamed the College of Ottawa in 1861 and received university status five years later through a royal charter. On 5 February 1889, the university was granted a pontifical charter by Pope Leo XIII, elevating the institution to a pontifical university. The university was reorganized on July 1, 1965, as a corporation, independent from any outside body or religious organization. As a result, the civil and pontifical charters were kept by the newly created Saint Paul University, federated with the university. The remaining civil faculties were retained by the reorganized university.

The University of Ottawa is the largest English-French bilingual university in the world. The university offers a wide variety of academic programs, administered by ten faculties including the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine, the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, the Telfer School of Management, and the University of Ottawa Faculty of Social Sciences. The University of Ottawa Library includes 12 branches, holding a collection of over 4.5 million titles. The university is a member of the Canadian U15 group of research-intensive universities, with a research income of C$324.581 million in 2017.

The school is co-educational and enrolls over 35,000 undergraduate and over 6,000 post-graduate students. The school has approximately 7,000 international students from 150 countries, accounting for 17 per cent of the student population. The university has a network of more than 195,000 alumni. The university's athletic teams are known as the Gee-Gees and are members of U Sports.