Professor Halevi-Wise has been jointly appointed in the departments of English and Jewish Studies at McGill since 2001. She was born in Israel, grew up in Mexico and completed her PhD in comparative literature at Princeton. Her first book, Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (2003), uses Dickens' Little Dorrit as a centrepiece. He was always her favorite author. She lives in Cote St Luc with her husband (a mathematician) and their four children.