Research Interests:
- History on screen
- Gendered divisions of labour in Hollywood
- SFX/VFX history
- Television and New Media
Current Research Projects/Grants:
- Creating the Extraordinary: Recovering the Histories of Women in Special and Visual Effects
- The Hustle & the Bustle: Costume Drama, Gender, and the WeeksWorth Scale in the Peak TV Era (with Sara Buttsworth at the University of Auckland).
- Monsters, Time-Travel, and Corsets: The Pleasures of Speculative Historical Fictions on Television
Courses Taught:
- 3D1G09: Design Principles and Practice I
- 3D2G05: Design Principles and Practice II
- 3D2G06: Industry Procedures and Practice I
- 3D3G03: Advanced Individual Production

History by HBO: Televising the American Past
Dr Rebecca Weeks
Recent Work
Weeks, R. “History, Horror, and Peak TV: Experimental History Series.” Television & New Media 25, no.4 (2024): 386-401.
Weeks, R. “What if? Experimental History on Television.” In The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image, edited by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Kim Nelson, and Mia E.M. Treacey, 314-329. New York: Routledge, 2023.
Weeks, R. “Marching Through Time: Māori History, Biographical Filmmaking and Whina,” Metro, 215, 2023: 54-57.
Weeks, R. History by HBO: Televising the American Past. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2022.
Upcoming: Weeks, R. “Experimental Screen Queens: Testing the boundaries of counterfactuals,” Paper accepted for the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies conference, Melbourne, December 2025.
Upcoming: Weeks, R. & Buttsworth, S. “The Hustle and the Bustle: Straining the stays of history and costume drama,” History Department Seminar, University of Auckland, October 2025.
Weeks, R. “The Pleasure of Terror: Riding the roller coaster of historical horror fictions,” Paper presented at the Historical Fictions Research Workshop, Online, November 2024.
Weeks, R. “Invisible in Movie Magic: Women in the visual effects industry of the 1970s and 1980s,” Paper presented at the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) conference, Adelaide, December 2024.