President Barack Obama is coming to Lawrence next week, the White House has announced.

The president will visit Kansas University on Thursday “to discuss the themes he’ll lay out in his State of the Union address,” White House spokesman Keith Maley told the Journal-World on Friday night.

A day earlier, on Wednesday, Obama will make a similar pitch at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.

“Further details on the president’s travel next week will be available in the coming days,” Maley said.

“Our community will be honored to welcome President Obama to the University of Kansas,” Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little said Friday night. “This is an exciting time for KU, and to welcome the president of the United States and have an opportunity to share our bold aspirations with him only adds to that excitement.”

President Obama was scheduled to visit KU in April 2013, but the trip later was canceled in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. Obama would be the fourth sitting U.S. president to visit KU, with the last sitting president to visit being William H. Taft in 1911. The other two presidents who visited KU while in office were Ulysses S. Grant in 1873 and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879. Five additional presidents — Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton — visited KU after leaving office.