Carl Cornell is a scholar of modern and contemporary France in the fields of French cultural studies, landscape studies, and the environmental humanities. He is Lecturer in French Studies and Landscape Studies at Smith College. Prior to joining the faculty at Smith, he previously taught at Colby College and Williams College. He holds a Ph.D. in French from Penn State (2018), with a specialization in French Culture and Society.
Carl Cornell conducts research on how cities are managing the transition from the industrial age to the era of sustainable development. He is currently writing a book, entitled Recycling Industry: The Livable French City Today, in which he examines how four cities across continental France (Roubaix, Angoulême, Nantes, and Lyon) are using cultural initiatives to recycle their former industrial spaces and generate a dynamic sense of place and renewed local identity. He has published part of his findings in a 2018 article that appeared in Contemporary French Civilization, and his research on deindustrialization informed a second article on André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) and Didier van Cauwelaert’s Un aller simple (1994) that appeared in The French Review in 2021.
Carl Cornell has broad experience in the classroom, having taught 32 sections of 23 different courses, ranging from introductory, intermediate, and advanced language courses to topics courses on subjects such as sustainability in/of cities from across the French-speaking world and literary and filmic representations of workers in France. In all his courses, he aims to cultivate classroom inclusivity and students’ creativity, including through digital humanities projects.