academic department

An academic department is a division of a university or school faculty devoted to a particular academic discipline. This article covers United States usage at the university level.The organization of faculties into departments is not standard, but most U.S. universities will have at least departments of History, Physics, English (language and literature), Psychology, and so on. Sometimes divisions are coarser: a liberal arts college which de-emphasizes the sciences may have a single Science department; an engineering university may have one department for Language and literature (in all languages). Sometimes divisions may be finer: for example, Harvard University  has separate departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Some disciplines are found in different departments at different institutions: biochemistry may be in biology, in chemistry or in its own department; computer science may be in mathematics, applied mathematics, electrical engineering, or its own department (the usual case nowadays).
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Noun
1. a division of a school that is responsible for a given subject
(hypernym) department, section
(hyponym) anthropology department, department of anthropology