Hunan Normal University (simplified Chinese: 湖南师范大学; traditional Chinese: 湖南師範大學; pinyin: Húnán Shīfàn Dàxué), founded in 1938, is a higher education institution in Changsha, Hunan Province. The university is a former 211 Project university, one of the country’s 100 key universities in the 21st century that enjoy priority in obtaining national funds. It is also a Chinese state Double First Class University Plan university, a major government initiative to comprehensively develop a group of elite universities into “world-first-class universities” by 2050. It is particularly reputable for its concentration on teachers education and training, foreign language studies, Chinese literature and history.
In 2021, Hunan Normal University ranked 601-700th globally by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and ranked 685th by SCImago Institutions Rankings among research universities around the world.[4] The 2021 CWTS Leiden Ranking ranked HNU at 720th in the world based on their publications for the period 2016–2019. The Nature Index 2021 Annual Tables by Nature Research ranked HNU among the top 500 leading research institutions globally for the high quality of research publications in natural science.