The 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). Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the Sally Hacker Prize was not awarded in 2020. Books published in 2017 are also eligible for the 2021 prize. The prize consists of an award of $2,000 and a plaque.
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 renominated. Each book is eligible for three years after its publication date (4 years for the 2021 Hacker Prize). So it is possible to nominate a book in three consecutive years (4 consecutive years in 2021). In case it concerns a renomination 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 renomination.
Nominated books for the 2021 Hacker Prize should have been received by the committee members by April 15th 2021. It is not possible anymore to nominate books for the 2021 prize. The 2022 Call for Nominations and a link to the online submission form will be posted here mid-February 2022.
For more information, please contact the SHOT Secretariat, [email protected].
SHOT president John Krige (right) and the recipient of the Sally Hacker Prize 2018 Mar Hicks in St. Louis during the Awards Ceremony. (Photo by Bucky Stanton)
2021 Hacker Prize Committee
| Ann N. Greene, co-Chair (2020-2022) |
| Mar Hicks co-Chair (2019-2021) |
| Timothy Stoneman (2018-2021) |
| Alex Cummings (2021-2023) |
Recipients of the Sally Hacker Prize
| 2021 |
Ainissa Ramirez; The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (The MIT Press 2019) |
| 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) |
