[4] She said of the experience: I had grown up next door to the Congregational church where my father was the minister, so I was very comfortable in churches, in England I was surrounded by all these marvelous cathedrals, and I went with Pevsner on field trips to take measurements and to try to discover the little seams that marked the places where one work period stopped and another picked up.
[5]After returning from London, Corn spent a year in Paris as an au pair for a small local family to learn the French necessary for her continued studies in art history.
In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
[2][3] In 2013, Corn held a conference with Stanford Alumni Association, where she discussed modern society's definition of "fine arts" and what it means for the museum industry going further into the 21st century.
Her curations are known for "exhibitions that juxtapose material artifacts with art to establish context and richness of interpretation.
"[1] She pioneered the concept of "moderns": those who "began to claim the skyscrapers, billboards, brand-name products, factories, jazz, advertisements and even plumbing fixtures of the 1920s as identifiers of the new "Americanness.
In 2003–2004 she received a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she pursued research on Gertrude Stein and the Making of the Modern.
On May 28, 2017, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, for her contributions to art.