Iris Chang (1968 – 2004) was an American historian and journalist, best known for her international best-seller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. She committed suicide in Santa Clara County, CA in 2004.

Paula Kamen, Iris Chang's long-time confidante and biographer, will lead a conversation on Chang's mysterious suicide, and her spiral into mental illness and paranoia. 

Kamen is a UIUC '89 graduate in journalism. Her commentaries and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post,Chicago Tribune, Salone.com, Ms., In These Times, and more than a dozen anthologies. In her biography Finding Iris Chang: Ambition, Friendship, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind, Kamen examines Chang’s celebrated and controversial career as a journalist and historical author, as well as her perplexing suicide. The Chicago Tribune called the biography "engrossing" and "fascinating," and named it as one of its "favorite books of 2007". Kamen lives in Chicago with her husband and young son.

This event is now CLOSED. We look forward to 'seeing' the participants on Aug 7. 

Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2009.
Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm PST.
Registration: This event is FREE to ALL alumni!
Conference Call: Conference Call details (Dial-in and pass code) will be provided a day before the event by e-mail.
Questions? Contact Anita Anandan.

Iris Chang was raised in Champaign-Urbana, where she attended the University Laboratory High School of Urbana. She completed a bachelor's degree in journalism at UIUC in 1989, and later a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She later worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, in which capacity she wrote six front-page articles over the course of a single year. She lived in San Jose, CA in the final years of her life.

Chang wrote three books documenting the experiences of Chinese Americans in history, making her a national spokesperson for Chinese Americans. Her first book, Thread of the Silkworm (1995) tells the life story of the Chinese professor, Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Although Tsien was a founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), he was suddenly falsely accused of being a spy. Tsien and his family were wrongfully imprisoned in an isolated island off of Los Angeles for five years.

Her second book, The Rape of Nanking:The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), documents war atrocities committed against the Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The work remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for a stunning 10 weeks. The documentary film, Nanking (2007), was based on her account, and was dedicated to her. It won the Peabody Award, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize (Documentary) at the Sundance Film Festival.

Her third book, The Chinese in America (2003), is a history of Chinese-Americans which argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. Consistent with the style of her earlier works, the book relied heavily on personal accounts. She wrote, "The America of today would not be the same America without the achievements of its ethnic Chinese," and that "scratch the surface of every American celebrity of Chinese heritage and you will find that, no matter how stellar their achievements, no matter how great their contribution to U.S. society, virtually all of them have had their identities questioned at one point or another."