The Sally Hacker Prize
Updated 11 July 2025
It is not possible yet to nominate books for the 2025 Hacker Prize. The call for nominations will be posted here in the 15 July. De deadline for submissions will be 30 August. Please stay tuned.
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].
David Nemer, 2024 Hacker Prize recipient, replied via Zoom at the Awards Event in Chile. (Photo SHOT)
2024 Hacker Prize Committee
| Thomas S. Mullaney (2022-2024), Chair |
| Sulfikar Amir (2024-2026) |
| Mara Mills (2024-2026) |
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Recipients of the Sally Hacker Prize
| 2024 |
David Nemer, Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022) |
| 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 |
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| 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) |
