The Penn Reading Project is going visual.

The University has announced that the 2009-2010 PRP will focus not on a text, but rather Thomas Eakins’ painting, The Gross Clinic. This will be the first year that the PRP will use a painting as its subject.

The PRP was created two decades ago to help introduce incoming freshmen to academic life at Penn. Past subjects of the PRP include such books as Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish,” Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture” and Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography.”

For more information about the 2009-2010 PRP, or to read more about the program’s past subjects, visit the PRP web site at www.collegehouses.upenn.edu/prp/.

Originally published March 5, 2009