Ms Bunce (28) already has an Otago BA (Hons) degree in politics and English and an MPhil degree from Oxford. She expects to complete a DPhil in politics in June.
A former Otago Daily Times columnist, she is helping teach an Otago paper on "News Media and International Crises", as part of the university's latest annual summer school, yesterday giving the first of two lectures.
"I'm now a fourth generation lecturer," Ms Bunce added, saying she was proud to have become part of a long line of "very strong-minded and self-assured" female academics in her family who had gained degrees from Otago University and also lectured there.
It was "nice being part of a tradition", part of a lineage of women "who are strong-minded and out there saying stuff and doing stuff".
In much earlier times, it had been "hard for women to hold academic posts" at universities and female academics were often required to leave when they married.
Her great-grandmother, Phyllis Calvert (nee Turnbull), was a lecturer in the French department at Otago during World War 1, and Mrs Calvert's sister, Isabel Turnbull, also taught classics at the University of Otago for more than 30 years.
It is understood to be the first family to provide female academic staff at Otago University for four successive generations.
Ms Bunce's grandmother, the late Prof Barbara Calvert, long served as an academic at Otago, becoming in 1976 the trail-blazing first female head of a New Zealand university education department.
After Prof Calvert died in 2008, Ms Bunce described her as "a strong woman who challenged the world with principles, love and gusto and taught her whole family to do the same".
Ms Bunce's mother, Dr Jenny Bunce, was a senior lecturer in the Otago education department at Otago in the 1980s and 1990s.
Dr Bunce's sister, Hilary Calvert, a senior Dunedin lawyer and former MP, also taught law professional courses at Otago beginning in the late 1980s.
Ms Bunce's Otago lectures examine the international news coverage of crises in Africa, analysing some of the main drawbacks and how the coverage influenced foreign policy responses.
Her talks were based on research undertaken for her doctorate in Sudan, Uganda and Kenya, working with foreign correspondents.
She would like to return to New Zealand to do academic work, a view reinforced by her recent experience of a "glorious summer" in Dunedin, contrasting with the UK's cold winters.