Dr. Wittner helped to establish the Women's Studies Program in 1979 (the first such program at a Jesuit University) and served as its director for five years. She taught courses in qualitative methods, the sociology of families, gender studies, and the politics of food. She was also a pioneer in ethnography and taught field methods and gender studies workshops around the world, including Nigeria, El Salvador, and Lithuania. Her research was always driven by a commitment to understanding institutions “from the bottom up,” in her words. Her commitment to the voices of marginalized people resonates through thousands of pages of her handwritten notes in the scrupulously transcribed words of so many interviewees: dispossessed women workers, foster kids, victims of domestic violence.