Built by experience. Grounded in practice.
Interstice is a small practice by design — built by people whose understanding of cultural distance comes from having lived inside it. Each person here brings a different vantage point, a different set of languages, a different map of the world. What they share is decades of experience working within the spaces, environments, and complexities they now help others navigate.
Provençal by birth, American by choice. A published scholar whose work spans Early Modern literature, continental philosophy, and Islamic cultural studies — across institutions in France, Lebanon, the UK, and the United States. His thinking moves transversally, between disciplines and across traditions, finding lines of connection that no single field can see from the inside. That method is the intellectual core of what Interstice does.
Full profile →Born in the United States and raised in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia and beyond — Heather is a true Third Culture Kid, one who developed a global perspective not just by studying it but by living it from a very young age. We are all students of our environments, and hers were plural from the start. Her background in Cultural Anthropology and Global Studies gave language and framework to what she had already learned: how culture shapes the way people communicate, what they trust, what they resist, and why — and how much is lost when that dimension goes unread.
Full profile →Lived experience across cultures, continents, and disciplines.
Interstice draws on a distinguished network of advisors whose expertise spans academic scholarship, field experience, diplomatic service, deep regional knowledge — each one bringing a perspective that only a specific life can produce — scholars, artists, doctors, writers, diplomats, and beyond.
A scholar whose work sits at the intersection of visual culture, Islamic studies, and the representation of Arabs and Muslims in the West. Author of The Visual Divide between Islam and the West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Hatem brings to Interstice a rigorous and deeply personal understanding of how cultures see — and misread — one another across the East–West axis. His formation spans Damascus, UCLA, and the University of Central Florida, where he received his PhD in Texts and Technology. His 2016 essay "Deleuze, ISIS, and Delirium" appeared in the Journal for Cultural Research special issue on Deleuze co-edited by FX and Christian Beck.
Full profile →A scholar, author, and artist whose work in Shakespeare iconography and visual poetics has been published internationally, most recently the subject of FX's 2024 preface in Picturing Shakespeare (Anthem Press, New York). Jean-Louis holds the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Aix-Marseille University and is a researcher at LERMA and member of the Société Française Shakespeare. Working at the intersection of art, literature, and cultural history, he brings to Interstice a depth of understanding of French and European cultural life that is both intellectual and lived. He is based in Provence, where Partage takes root.
Full profile →A scholar of British literature, cultural theory, and the literature of place and space. Author of Spatial Resistance (Lexington Books, 2019) and editor of Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), with a forthcoming volume from Palgrave in 2026. Christian received his PhD in English Literature and Cultural Theory from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2010. His co-edited special issue with François-Xavier Gleyzon on Deleuze in the Journal for Cultural Research (2016) sits among the documented scholarly threads that shape the way Interstice thinks. His work on spatial thinking, cultural movement, and the politics of place maps directly onto the cultural formation analysis at the core of the practice's methodology.
Full profile →A graduate of the University of Central Florida and the University of Edinburgh, Ivy works at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth — the world's first graduate school of business — where she navigates complex networks of scholars, donors, and institutional decision-makers with fluency and care. Her ability to communicate clearly within and between those networks, and her understanding of how culture operates at the intersection of academia and power, is exactly the kind of formation Interstice exists to take seriously. Her perspective represents that of a younger generation of capable professionals with a strong voice of intention and direction — a voice that enriches both the practice and the work it does.
Full profile →A historian whose three-decade body of work traces the emergence of the modern Middle East — from Ottoman decline to the formation of the Turkish Republic, and the unfinished questions of Kurdish identity, secularism, and regional political formation. Author of Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State (SUNY Press, 2004), From Caliphate to Secular State (Praeger, 2011), and The Decline of the Ottoman Empire and the Rise of the Turkish Republic (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), with scholarship and public commentary appearing in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and PBS Chicago. Hakan received his PhD in History from The Ohio State University and brings rigorous historical depth to the East ↔ West conversations Interstice engages in — grounded in archival research, multilingual sourcing, and sustained engagement with the region itself.
Full profile →Fred Zerick has spent more than fifty years working across the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe — not only as a visitor, but as someone who has lived and operated within those cultures since he first left the country at the age of seventeen. A decorated Vietnam Veteran and specialist in helicopter aviation, his career took him into some of the most complex operating environments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, where the ability to communicate, navigate, and build trust across cultural lines was the actual variable between success and failure.
He speaks English, Arabic, German, and Tagalog — a range that reflects a lifetime spent living inside cultures, not simply passing through them. What that kind of life produces is not a set of cultural facts but a deeply human understanding: that the way people communicate, trust, and receive one another is shaped by forces that run far deeper than procedure or protocol. Fred has spent fifty years learning to read those forces — in the field, in communities, across generations — and understanding what they ask of the people trying to work well within them.
At Interstice, Fred brings that understanding to engagements where the human dimension of cultural difference is not a peripheral concern but the central one — work involving the Middle East, Africa, defense, strategic, and diplomatic communities, and any context where the ability to connect across cultural lines determines whether the work succeeds at all. He is, in the fullest sense, the formation from which Heather's own way of seeing was built — and his presence at Interstice reflects the conviction that the most valuable cultural intelligence is always lived before it is ever taught.
Interstice is currently assembling a formal advisory board whose range reflects the geographic, disciplinary, and experiential scope of the practice itself — scholars, artists, physicians, executive coaches, civic leaders, environmental policy professionals, and cultural practitioners across the United States, France, Italy, Spain, the Middle East, and beyond. Names will be announced as the board is formally constituted.