The Sally Hacker Prize
Update 3 April 2020 |
The physicality of book shipments this spring, with many university offices closed down, makes it impossible to conduct the judging for this prize “as normal.” Consequently, SHOT has decided to postpone the normal cycle of the Hacker Prize for 2020. We will extend the 2021 eligibility to ensure that all books are fairly considered for this award. We ask for your understanding in these unusual times. |
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 and a plaque.
Publishers and authors are invited to nominate titles for this prize. The deadline for receipt of books for the 2020 prize is 15 April 2020.
To nominate a book, please send one copy to each of the committee members listed below. While each book is eligible for three years after its publication date, it must be specifically renominated in years two and/or three of eligibility in order to be reconsidered. Renomination requires that a copy of the book be sent to any new committee members, and any returning committee member who previously received the book must receive a letter renominating the book.
For more information, please contact the committee chair or Jan Korsten, SHOT Secretary, [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)
2020 Hacker Prize Committee
Mar Hicks (2019-2021), Chair
3301 S. Dearborn St.
Siegel Hall Suite 218
Humanities Dept.
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL 60616 |
Timothy Stoneman (2018-2020)
Georgia Tech-Lorraine
2 Rue Marconi
57070 Metz, France |
Ann N. Greene (2020-2022)
391 Cohen Hall
249 S. 36th Street
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104 |
Recipients of the Sally Hacker Prize
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) |