[1][2] Wisskirchen was born on 23 June 1936 in Hagen and studied law in Munich and Bonn; then she worked from 1965 to 1967 as a lawyer in the Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
In 1981 she began studying Christian Archeology, Ancient Church History and Patrology at the University of Bonn, graduating in 1989 with Josef Engemann.
From 1989 to 2017 she was a regular lecturer at the Universities of Bonn, Mainz, Cologne, Bochum and Wuppertal.
Through regular annual excursions to the archaeologically relevant sites, she made sure that students got to know the scenes of late antique history in southern Europe and the Middle East from their own point of view.
In 2000, the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Bochum appointed her - as the second woman and first Protestant - honorary professor.