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The Sally Hacker Prize

Updated 16 January 2024

It is now possible to nominate books for the 2024 Hacker Prize. Nominated books should be received by the prize committee no later than 15 March 2024.

Go to the online portal to nominate a book and find more information

Sally Hacker Prize

The Sally Hacker Prize was established in 1999 to honor exceptional scholarship that reaches beyond the academy toward a broad audience. Any book published in the three years preceding the year of the award is eligible (for example, books eligible for the 2019 award would have been published in 2016–2018). The prize consists of an award of $2,000.

Publishers and authors are invited to nominate titles for this prize. To nominate a book, all committee members listed below need to receive a copy of the nominated book. You can nominate books via our online submission system. After completing the submission you will receive a confirmation e-mail with further instructions and mail addresses of the committee members.

Eligible books that have been nominated for the Hacker Prize before can be re-nominated. Each book is eligible for three years after its publication date. So it is possible to nominate a book in three consecutive years. In case it concerns a re-nomination you have to indicate this in the online submission form. You must make sure to send a copy of the book to newly appointed Hacker Prize Committee members, and you have to inform the returning committee members (who already received the book before) that it concerns a re-nomination.

For more information, please contact the SHOT Secretariat,  [email protected].

Hacker Prize 2023 Recipient Alexander Monea (left), and SHOT Vice-President Debbie Douglas. (Photo SHOT)

2024 Hacker Prize Committee

Thomas S. Mullaney (2022-2024), Chair
Sulfikar Amir (2024-2026)
Mara Mills (2024-2026)

 Recipients of the Sally Hacker Prize

2023 Alexander Monea, The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight (MIT Press, 2023)
2022 Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press 2021)
2021 Ainissa Ramirez, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (The MIT Press 2020)
2020 Morgan C. Ames, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (The MIT Press 2019)
2019 Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (The MIT Press, 2018)
2018 Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologist and Lost Its Edge in Computing (The MIT Press, 2017)
2017 Noris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson, Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster (The Huntington Library and the University of California Press, 2015)
2016 Laura Snyder, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing (W. W. Norton and Company, 2015)
2015 W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press, 2013)
2014 Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013)
2013 Regina Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (MIT Press, 2012)
2012 Molly Berger, Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829–1929 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)
2011 James R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press, 2010)
2010 Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Harvard University Press, 2009)
2009
2008 W. Bernard Carlson, Technology in World History (Oxford University Press, 2005)
2007 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (University of California Press, 2004)
2006 Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape (W.W. Norton, 2005)
2005 David Herlihy, Bicycle: The History (Yale University Press, 2004)
2004 Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking, 2003)
2003 Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar Strauss and Giroux 2002)
2002 Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson (Harper Collins, 1999)
2001 David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
2000 Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Times Books 1999)
1999 Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (Norton 1997)