In 1991, Corsi was awarded the Palmes Académiques by the French government, and in 2016 he was the Marc–August Pictet medallist of the Société de Physique et d'histoire naturelle of Geneva.

In 1992, with the help of Benedetta Craveri, Roberto Calasso, Furio Colombo, and Umberto Eco, Corsi launched the Italian language edition of The New York Review of Books, La Rivista dei Libri, of which he was Editor-in-Chief (1992–2010).

The exhibition catalogue was printed in Italian and French by Electa, Milan and the English language edition was published by Oxford University Press US under the title The Enchanted Loom.

Genèse et enjeux du transformisme 1770–1830 (2001), with appendices devoted to the prosopography of the 978 pupils who attended Lamarck's lectures at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle from 1795 to 1823, and to the transcription of notes taken at his classes.

In several publications, Corsi also explored the relationship between the intellectual and the social practices of natural sciences during the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration, and paid particular attention to the large population of naturalists writing for periodicals, encyclopaedias and dictionaries.

Elements of an answer were provided in entries for the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani devoted to figures such as Igino Cocchi, Carlo de Stefani or Felice Giordano; a first synthesis was offered in 2007 in the article "Much Ado about Nothing.

In 1991, thanks to the suggestion of colleagues and librarians at the Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Pisa, Corsi recovered a major collection of letters addressed to Giuseppe Meneghini, Professor of Geology from 1849 to 1889.

In 2008, Corsi published a small albeit significant selection of the Meneghini correspondence, covering the years 1853–1857, and monitoring the personal contacts the Pisa geologists entertained with colleagues in France, England and the German States (Fossils and reputations, 2008).

The letters (relevant excerpts in English are reproduce in the long introduction) are a precious guide to the complex negotiations of authority and reputations within the European earth sciences of the middle of the 19th century.

Latterly, Corsi has explored the transition from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth century within debates on life and its history; particular reference is placed on the acrimonious and politically charged denunciations of materialism and atheism that forced many naturalists and commentators to adopt defensive strategies and to distance themselves from unsavoury doctrines.