The Mahoney Prize recognizes an outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology, broadly conceived. The Mahoney Prize commemorates the late Princeton scholar Michael S. Mahoney, whose profound contributions to the history of computing came from his many articles and book chapters. The prize consists of a $500 award and a certificate. For the 2023 prize, articles published in the preceding three years (2020, 2021, and 2022) are eligible for nomination. The Mahoney Prize is awarded by the Special Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) and is presented at the SIG’s annual meeting.

Please email copies of nomination articles to the 2023 Prize Committee by April 30, 2023. Please direct any questions to the 2023 committee chair, Kevin Driscoll.

2023 Mahoney Prize Committee:

Kevin Driscoll (Committee Chair), Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia, ked5d@virginia.edu

Valérie Schafer, Professor, Contemporary European History, University of Luxembourg, valerie.schafer@uni.lu

Janet Toland, Associate Professor, School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, janet.toland@vuw.ac.nz

Previous winners:

2022: Theodora Vardouli and David Theodore, “Walking Instead of Working: Space Allocation, Automatic Architecture, and the Abstraction of Hospital Labor,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 43, no. 2 (April-June 2021): 6-17.

2021: Colette Perold, “IBM’s World Citizens: Valentim Bouças and the Politics of IT Expansion in Authoritarian Brazil,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing42, no. 3 (July-September 2020): 38-52.

2020: Oliver Belcher. “Sensing, Territory, Population: Computation, Embodied Sensors, and Hamlet Control in the Vietnam War,” Security Dialogue 50.5, (2019) 416-436.

2019: Nikhil Menon. “‘Fancy Calculating Machine’: Computers and planning in independent India.” Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 421-457.

2018: Joanna Radin. “Digital Natives: How Medical and Indigenous Histories Matter for Big Data.” Osiris Vol. 32, No. 1 (2017): 43-64

2017: Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson, “’One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech.” Computational Culture (January 15, 2016). 

2016: Andrew L. Russell and Valérie Schafer, “In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (October 2014): 880-907.

2015: David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerard Alberts, “When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960,” Technology and Culture 55 (January 2014): 40-75.