After studies in geography at the University of Montreal and the Université Laval, she gained her Masters and PhD at Duke University.
She lived for eight years in New Zealand, where she was a founding member of the Dunedin Collective for Woman[1] and taught women's history at the University of Otago in 1975 and 1976.
In 1996, she taught at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels) in the group chaired by Suzanne Tassier.
Her inquiry into the history of resistance to the established order are exemplified by her biographies of the communist militant Jeanne Corbin[2] and of the québécoise free-thinker Éva Circé-Côté.
Lévesque is a member of the Groupe d'histoire de Montréal.