Graham Campbell-Dunn was awarded his MA in Classics with First Class Honours by the University of New Zealand and went to Cambridge on a Postgraduate Scholarship. There he studied under the comparativists WS Allen and RG Coleman, and was privileged to be taught by John Chadwick, who worked on Mycenaean Greek. His teachers also included John Lyons (Linguistics), Frank Stubbings, RM Cook and Hugh Plommer (Archaeology).

Returning to New Zealand he taught Classics at University and researched a PhD on Herodotus, the Greek historian and anthropologist. He has a special interest in Italian substrate theory, and has spent his retirement investigating links between Africa and the early Mediterranean. Graham is a follower of the German Africanist D. Westermann.