Dissertation Title:
Blue Mondays No More? A Comparative Analysis of Washing Machine Adoption in 20th-Century Canada, the United States, and Britain

Rebecca Giblon is an economic and business historian with a focus on the United States in a transnational context. Her dissertation, Blue Mondays No More? A Comparative Analysis of Washing Machine Adoption in 20th-Century Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, examines how washing machines moved from elite curiosities to normative household appliances, reshaping domestic labor and consumer expectations in the process. By centering the role of manufacturers, infrastructure, and public policy, her work argues that divergent rates of appliance adoption primarily depended on infrastructural conditions like access to electricity and plumbing.

Rebecca completed her undergraduate studies at York University, Toronto, where she has a BA in History and a BComm in Finance. Outside of academia, she volunteers as a genetic genealogist, connecting adoptees and Holocaust survivors with their birth families.