Raafat Gilani

At seventeen, I published my first novel, The Day I Died (2017), followed by Sure (2019). That early act of storytelling evolved into a broader pursuit of how narrative, language, and culture intersect. My academic path in English studies at Jamia Millia Islamia and Dr B. R. Ambedkar University gave me the critical tools to explore those questions. At Ambedkar University, my dissertation examined generative AI in folkloristics, combining literary training with an emerging fascination for technology. Along the way, I took on editorial leadership roles at The Jamia Review and the English Literary Association, experiences that sharpened my sense of writing communities and the ways editing shapes meaning.
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Professionally, I have moved between publishing, analysis, and digital humanities. At The Digital Orientalist, I serve as the Editor for South Asian Studies, commissioning and shaping research-driven content on digital humanities and regional scholarship. At HarperCollins, I worked as an Assistant Development Editor, guiding manuscripts through the full publishing process, while at Turing I served as a Content Analyst and Video Annotator, balancing precision with accessibility in large-scale text data and contributing to the evaluation of frontier AI models. My research and projects extend into building Python-based tools for studying romanized Kashmiri and exploring how multilingualism and cultural forms adapt in digital contexts, from literature to folkloristics. Today my work sits at the intersection of literature, technology, and culture; an effort to make sense of culture in motion and to contribute to ways of thinking and creating that are both critical and imaginative.