A circulant of order $n$ is a Cayley graph for the cyclic group $\mathbb{Z}_n$, and as such, admits a transitive action of $\mathbb{Z}_n$ on its vertices. This paper concerns 2-cell embeddings of connected circulants on closed orientable surfaces. Embeddings on the sphere (the planar case) were classified by Heuberger (2003), and by a theorem of Thomassen (1991), there are only finitely many vertex-transitive graphs with minimum genus $g$, for any given integer $g \ge 3$. Here we completely determine all connected circulants with minimum genus 1 or 2; this corrects and extends an attempted classification of all toroidal circulants by Costa, Strapasson, Alves and Carlos (2010).