A specialist in political economy and cultural sociology, Cornell holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago and taught at Harvard University for nine years before moving to the University of California, San Diego, in 1989 and then to The University of Arizona in 1998. He has written widely on Indigenous affairs, economic development, collective identity, and ethnic and race relations. Among his publications are The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence, What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in American Indian Economic Development (co-edited with Joseph P. Kalt), and Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (co-authored with Douglas Hartmann).