(KAIR)--Benedictine College has announced that Thomas E. Woods, Jr. will be the featured speaker at the school’s convocation kicking off the academic year. The New York Times bestselling author of 11 books, Woods holds a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and a Master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He will speak on Sept. 3 at 11:00 a.m. in Ralph Nolan Gymnasium following the All-School Mass in the Abbey Church.  His presentation, “The Catholic Church Nobody Knows,” is free and open to the public.

Woods is the creator of the Liberty Classroom, a website which features history and economics lectures and discussion boards, and is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.  He has appeared on CNBC, MSNBC, FOX News Channel, FOX Business Network, C-SPAN, and Bloomberg Television, among other outlets, and has been a guest on hundreds of radio programs, including National Public Radio, the Dennis Miller Show, the Michael Reagan Show, the Dennis Prager Show, and the Michael Medved Show. He is a regular fill-in host on The Peter Schiff Show.

Woods is the author of eleven books. His critically acclaimed 2004 book The Church Confronts Modernity was recently released in paperback by Columbia University Press. Woods’ books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, French, German, Czech, Portuguese, Croatian, Slovak, Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.

Woods’ writing has appeared in dozens of popular and scholarly periodicals, including the American Historical Review, Christian Science Monitor, Catholic Historical Review, Modern Age, and Religion & Liberty.  In 2006, he won the $50,000 first prize in the prestigious Templeton Enterprise Award, given by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Templeton Foundation, for his book The Church and the Market. He was the recipient of the 2004 O.P. Alford III Prize for Libertarian Scholarship and of an Olive W. Garvey Fellowship from the Independent Institute in 2003. He has also been awarded two Humane Studies Fellowships and a Claude R. Lambe Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and a Richard M. Weaver Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

A contributor to six encyclopedias, Woods is co-editor of Exploring American History: From Colonial Times to 1877, an eleven-volume encyclopedia.

Woods lives in Topeka, Kansas, with his wife and four daughters.