Iris Shun-Ru Chang was an American journalist, author, and political activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanjing Massacre, The Rape of Nanking, and in 2003, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography Finding Iris Chang, and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking starring Olivia Cheng as Iris Chang. The independent 2007 documentary film Nanking was based on her work and dedicated to her memory.

Born to university professors who had emigrated from China, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. She attended the University Laboratory High School and graduated in 1985. She then earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1989, during which she also worked as a New York Times stringer, writing six front-page articles over the course of one year.