2024-2025 Humanities Institute Book Award Ceremony

The Humanities Institute (HI) Book Award celebrates outstanding writers whose contributions to the humanities change the conversation by fostering new directions for their discipline.

Professor Jo Guldi's The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights is the 2024 HI Book Award winner.

The Long Land War provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.

Jo Guldi completed her PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley (2008) and is currently Professor (in Practice) of Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University.  Previously, Dr. Guldi held positions mainly in Departments of History at the University of Chicago, the Harvard Society of Fellows, Brown University, and Southern Methodist University.  Dr. Guldi's research into quantitative methods focuses on improving AI approaches to understanding our past. Her historical research concerns the history of property rights, the origins of eminent domain, and the story of rent control.  Her articles have been published in the American Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, and Annales. From 2015-2021 she was PI of a $1 million NSF grant entitled "The Unaffordable World." Her-award winning books have been covered in The Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Boston Review, and Guardian.

Professor Christy Spackman's The Taste of Water is the 2025 HI Book Award winner.

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.

Christy Spackman is Associate Professor of Art/Science with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the GAME School at Arizona State University. Dr. Spackman studies how the management of tastes and smells in the things people eat and drink shapes their interactions with the environment. 

PLEASE NOTE THE EVENT TIMES

4:00 – 5:30 pm, talk about the book, Q&A

       * For in-person attendees, light refreshments will be provided.

       * For online attendees, the event will be livestreamed on ASU Live.

5:30 – 6:00 pm, Reception, Book Sale & Book Sign

For a full listing of all the Humanities Institute events visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/events