Benjamin Cornwell

Benjamin Thomas Cornwell (born April 30, 1978) is an American sociologist. He is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Cornell University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2007, where he studied under Edward Laumann, Linda Waite, and Jason Beckfield. He works on methods to study issues involving social inequality, the epidemic spread of disease, and collective behavior.

Benjamin Cornwell was born to Thomas and Susan (Smith) Cornwell in 1978 in Huntington, West Virginia. Through his maternal great-grandmother, Edna Alice (Hatfield) Smith, he is a cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield and Henry D. Hatfield. His paternal 4th great-grandfather is Thomas Hannan, a revolutionary war soldier and the first Anglo settler of the Kanawha River region of Virginia (now West Virginia)

He earned his B.A. in sociology in 2000 at the University of Cincinnati, his M.A. at The Ohio State University (with James Moody) in 2001, and his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 2007. His dissertation was titled Physical Function and Social Action, which argues that health is an important factor in determining individuals' positions within larger social networks. During his time as a student at Chicago, he was a research assistant for the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, on which he eventually became a co-investigator.

He also served for several years as a teaching intern and research assistant for Donald N. Levine while at Chicago. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging. He was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell in 2008, and was appointed as chair of that department in 2020, during the height of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

His research has advanced sociological methods, particularly in the areas of social network analysis and sequence analysis. One of his most important papers, co-authored with Kim Weeden, used data on the networks of students on college campuses to demonstrate that the risk of the epidemic spread of SARS-CoV-2 could be curbed by shutting down particularly large classes and moving them online.

He used national survey data to show that while older adults tend to have smaller social networks than do younger adults (e.g., due to repeated personal losses), they are generally more involved in community activities than are younger people. As a result, they are usually able to replace lost network ties with new ones, leading to homeostasis in their social networks.

His work on the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire has shown how people's risk of dying in an emergency evacuation is associated with how they are tied to the other people who are present when the disaster occurs. Those who are present with a larger group, and/or with closer contacts whom they are less willing to abandon, are more likely to die. This work emphasizes that the popular concept of "panic" rarely shapes behavior in emergencies, and that people instead tend to work rationally to maintain preexisting social roles and connections during these situations.

In 2017, the American Sociological Association's section on methodology awarded Cornwell the Leo Goodman award for distinctive contributions to sociological methodology, in recognition of his work in social network analysis and sequence analysis. He is an inaugural member of the international Sequence Analysis Association's advisory board.

• Carr, Deborah, Shelley Correll, Robert Crosnoe, Jeremy Freese, Mary C. Waters, Benjamin Cornwell, and Elizabeth Boyle. 2017. The Art and Science of Social Research. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
• Cornwell, Benjamin. 2015. Social Sequence Analysis. New York: Cambridge.
• Cornwell, Benjamin, Jonathan Gershuny, and Oriel Sullivan. 2019. “The Social Structure of Time: Emerging Trends and New Directions.” Annual Review of Sociology 45:301-320
• Cornwell, Benjamin, and Jing-Mao Ho. 2022. "Network Structure in Small Groups and Survival in Disasters." Social Forces 100:1357-1384.
• Cornwell, Benjamin, Edward Laumann, and L. Philip Schumm. 2008. “The Social Connectedness of Older Adults: A National Profile.” American Sociological Review 73:185-203.
• Weeden, Kim, and Benjamin Cornwell. 2020. “The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus.” Sociological Science.