[2] Following his graduation in 1972 he resided in different parts of the U.S. and was employed at various times as a cab driver, cook, tree surgeon, in a textile mill, on a farm, at a zoo, and in an office, eventually returning to Chicago where he worked as a union bricklayer.

[2] He undertook doctoral work in American religious history at the University of Chicago, defending with distinction a Ph.D. dissertation about the Revolutionary era in 1982.

He joined the religion and history departments at Florida State University in 2001, where he also was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Emotion.

Corrigan's contributions to scholarship are in three overlapping areas: American religious history, religion and emotion, and the spatial humanities.

[7] In Business of the Heart (2002) Corrigan evidenced the way in which emotion was imagined as a commodity in the nineteenth century, exchanged between individuals according to feeling rules, and conceptualized as both affective capital and a medium of trade between persons and a Protestant God.

[16] He has advised that scholars must take care to avoid creating a highly specialized and technical "secret language" to talk about emotion if progress is to be made investigating it alongside religion.

[20][21][15] The term "spatial humanities," which has been globally adopted, was coined by Corrigan, David Bodenhamer, and Trevor Harris at an expert workshop at the Polis Center in 2008.

[24][25] Corrigan and others have proposed that the "deep map," a detailed, multilayered, fluid, and polyvocal representation of space that blends quantitative and qualitative data, is a promising tool for the study of culture.

(Oxford University Press, 2007) Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History, coauthor with Lynn Neal (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) Religion in American History, co-editor with Amanda Porterfield (Blackwell, 2010) The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, co-editor with David Bodenhamer and Trevor Harris (Indiana University Press, 2010) Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, co-author with Winthrop Hudson, 8th (revised) edition, (Pearson, 2010) Jews, Christians, Muslims, co-author with Carlos M. N. Eire, Frederick Denny, and Martin S. Jaffee, 2nd ed.

(Pearson, 2010) Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives, co-editor with David Bodenhamer and Trevor M. Harris (Indiana University Press, 2015) Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions, general editor and co-author with Carlos M. Eire, Frederick Denny, and Martin S. Jaffee, (Routledge, 2015), reprint Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, co-author with Winthrop Hudson, 8th edition, (Routledge, 2015) Feeling Religion, ed., (Duke University Press, 2017) The Business Turn in American Religious History, co-editor with Amanda Porterfield and Darren Grem (Oxford University Press, 2017) Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, ed.