ASU Humanities Institute announces the winner of the 2025 Book Award
Established in 2008, the Humanities Institute Book Award is presented for a nonfiction work of humanities-based scholarship, celebrating outstanding writers whose contributions to the humanities change the conversation by fostering new directions for their discipline. This year, the Humanities Institute is thrilled to share that Christy Spackman’s “The Taste of Water” (2023, University of California Press) was honored with the 2025 award.
An associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, Spackman studies the environmental and social impact of scientific and technological efforts to manipulate sensory experiences of smelling and tasting. Her book explores how tap water in the United States and Europe got to taste the way it does, and her research weaves together different methods from history, anthropology, and the arts to create experiential learning opportunities for policy makers and the public as they deliberate around what sort of sensory futures they'd like to bring about.
The review committee shares, “This extraordinary book takes up a subject that might seem to be, literally, nothing — the taste of water — and then unfolds that seemingly negligible thing in the richest historical, scientific, and social contexts. Combining analysis of chemical and industrial processes with a study of the social formation of taste, Christy Spackman reveals the complex interplay among the scientific advances, cultural expectations, and hidden labor that shape the palatability and sustainability of drinking water. ‘The Taste of Water’ invites readers across the disciplines and beyond the academy to consider how their own preferences and habits around a critical and taken-for-granted resource intersects directly with public policy and environmental futures.”
Spackman will engage students and faculty during a lecture to be announced this fall, alongside Jo Guldi, who was awarded the 2024 Book Award for “The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights” and whose lecture was postponed earlier this year. In the meantime, readers can learn more by watching Spackman’s interview with Wellington Square Bookshop on YouTube.
Three books were shortlisted for the award, including “The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain” by Brian K. Goodman and “Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawaiʻi” by Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.