Department of Field Theory has been formed together with three other departments in 1976, when the Department of Theoretical Physics, chaired by Professor Jerzy Rayski, was split in the course of reforms of the Jagiellonian University.

Professor Rayski (1917-1993) was the Head of the new Department till 1986, and a custodian later. He worked on unification of fundamental interactions within the Kaluza-Klein kind of models, on an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics, and also on approximation methods in quantum theories.

In the period 1994-2017 the Department was headed by professor Henryk Arodź.